I'm just wild about Safran

You know what the haters can do? They can all-the-way suck it. The Stranger brought Jonathan Safran Foer (and the great Charles D'Ambrosio) to Seattle for a reading in a rock club last Thursday, and he was effing marvelous. Because I don't pay attention to the razor-toothed backbiting world of literary jealousy--i'm a little too busy paying attention to the razor-toothed backbiting world of rock jealousy, but not for long--I hadn't realized just how angry JSF's success had made certain people. Post reading, I went and found a ton of haterrific (hey, terrific!) criticism, most of which dismissed the writing with a wristflip, focusing instead on a)the textual experiments in the new book, and b) his money. Of the former, why so uptight? As to the latter, I quote my poet friend Pete Miller, who once asked: could anything matter less? I haven't finished either of JSF's books, but having read what I've read, I was utterly on his side going in. Now that I've heard him read, I'm all the more convinced that he's a very talented writer who takes risks and is concerned with important human matters. It's hard to write about innocence without sounding like a complete and utter creep, and, apparently, the attempt brings out the creep in a lot of book critics. Who can suck it.

Also, this is my new favorite sentence:

"'Jose,' I told him, and inside I was thinking What the?"

In other semi-celebrity news, I had dinner last night with Todd Solondz. He was incredibly gracious.